Portable Fume Cabinet for Chemistry cost £3,000

Key Points:-

• Chemical demonstrations are important as a teaching aid and can be spectacular and engaging
• A mobile fume cabinet with four clear sides providing a 360 degree view can be moved to a position within the laboratory to enable pupils to more easily view chemical demonstrations
• Pupils will enjoy the demonstrations and their motivation for Chemistry will grow

Chemistry is a practical subject and what can be more stimulating than a chemical demonstration performed before an audience? Many people who have attracted to studying the subject have done so as a result of a memorable visual experiment performed in the laboratory.

Withington is nationally known for the quality of its Science teaching and a large and growing proportion of sixth form girls currently study Chemistry (55% at AS level and 37% at A2). In order to facilitate more challenging practical work which is to a standard expected of prospective undergraduates the Department would like to purchase a mobile fume cabinet to enable pupils to more fully engage in and view practical demonstrations.

Chemical demonstrations have an important role to play in teaching:

– They provide a visual attraction to the fun of chemistry and are a teaching aid for use with students.
– They are often spectacular, stimulating and motivating.
– They allow students to see experiments which they would not be able to perform themselves, for reasons of skill, safety, expensive apparatus and materials or limited resources.
– They allow students to see a skilled practitioner.

Unfortunately, many demonstrations involve the production of gases which have hazard classifications or else have been given exposure limits. In school science, releases of these gases cannot be totally prevented and so they must be controlled, that is, their levels in the air kept below the exposure limits. The most usual method of control is a fume cupboard.

Ideally, a demonstration fume cupboard needs to be glazed all around and positioned so that the demonstrator can stand at the aperture, with all observers around all four sides. The only way to achieve this is to have a fume cupboard with a certain degree of mobility, which fits through doorways and can therefore be shared between laboratories. Our aim is to purchase an excellent mobile fume cupboard in which harmful fumes are passed through filters and clean air is re-circulated back into the room.